


The War At Home

by allthebeautifulthings9828



Category: Original Work
Genre: Character Turned Into a Ghost, Female Soldier, Female-Centric, Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Iraq, Male-Female Friendship, Original Fiction, POV First Person, POV Original Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Soldiers, Spirit World, Spirits, Spiritual, Wakes & Funerals, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-02
Updated: 2014-10-02
Packaged: 2018-02-19 15:17:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2393168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthebeautifulthings9828/pseuds/allthebeautifulthings9828
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An Iraqi war veteran succumbs to the horrors of PTSD after being sent home. As she attends her own wake, having overdosed on heroin, she realizes she's no longer alive. In fact, she's a ghost. She reflects on the choices that brought her there and learns to make peace with the help of the Iraqi child, another ghost, that she couldn't save in the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The War At Home

They told me I was dying but I didn’t believe them. Even as the circles under my eyes deepened and the bruises on my arms darkened, I still didn’t believe them.

I was invincible, after all.

I had survived war.

Bush sent me to Iraq as a naïve 19-year-old girl but I was tougher than I looked, much to the surprise of everyone who knew me. I didn’t know who or what I was fighting. Hell, none of us did, really. We just answered the call to defend our country after the towers fell. But seeing Iraqi children blown to pieces by insurgents fucked with my mind. Anybody thinkin’ they could take it ain’t made up of nothin’ but big fake balls and bravado. I did two tours in that sandbox rat hole before I got discharged.

Getting discharged didn’t mean the war left me alone though. The nightmares started so fast that I never got a minute to rest. Brown eyes and tanned skin, dirty kids speaking in lyrical, ancient tongues stared me down as if I had been the one building roadside bombs. They died a thousand times in my dreams, soon turning into goddamn zombies like some Night of the Living Dead shit.

I lost my job at the gas station. It didn’t matter. That job didn’t pay enough to support my habit anyway. David was in my unit with me and showed me how to shoot up because, he said, it was the only thing that stopped the nightmares. He knew.

And now I’m watching David watch me. Except it’s not really me. He’s crying like a fucking baby over a skin bag of bones in a box.

“I’m over here, dumbass! Quit crying! I’m fine!”

He doesn’t hear me. I even wave my arms but then I realize I don’t see any arms. I’m just a cloud of sparkly gas and nobody can see me. Fucking great. I survive Bush’s war alongside the toughest men in the country but apparently I get to spend eternity looking like something Tinkerbell farted.

I will myself closer and peer into the box. Jesus, I made a mess of my body. I can’t even believe they’re having an open casket wake. I guess it doesn’t really matter though because as I look behind me, I don’t see any butts in the chairs. It’s just David, my old warhorse. Something painful seeps into my Tinkerbell fart body and I think I should cry but I can’t cry without eyeballs. Panic wells up from the floor into whatever I am now. It hurts. It hurts so bad. I ruined my family and now they won’t come say goodbye to a body pumped full of heroin. Where am I supposed to go now?

“Dave, man, we gotta go. It’s midnight. They’re gonna lock up.”

Here comes Paul up the empty aisle to collect my old warhorse. Paul and I never really got along. Maybe it was because I called him Uniball Paul on account of hearing he was only blessed with one nut. Men are so sensitive about those things. I’m kind of sorry about it now and the memory only momentarily deflects my growing anxiety. They don’t give you a manual when you die.

“I shoulda got her in rehab or something,” David mutters over my body.

“You know that doesn’t work unless the person actually wants to get clean. There was nothing you could do. Come on.”

An echo overlaps Paul’s voice as he beckons David to come on with him. It’s a higher voice and an accent lifts the syllables. A sweeter tone I never heard. I follow the sound of the voice, somehow knowing it’s for me, and the translucent figure of a little boy melts into the atmosphere near a potted plant in the corner of the room. Nobody sees him except me. Of course not. He’s dead too.

“Come on,” the boy says again.

I don’t move. What if it’s a trap? I’ve seen Ghost and how the bad guy gets dragged kicking and screaming down to hell by the black baddies. I’d rather be in limbo forever than get dragged to hell for killing Iraqi men and filling my body full of junk.

The boy comes closer. He knows what I’m thinking. A subtle smile pulls his lips up, bringing his other features into sharper focus. Suddenly I recognize him. I last saw him over a year ago when he sat in a Jeep beside his father. The Jeep flew down a desert road and tripped an IUD that neither we nor they saw. In an instant, another nameless Iraqi child vaporized as if he never existed.

“Come on.”

The softness and love in his dark eyes draws me in and the funeral home fades away. As I extend my energy to him, I realize I’m no longer a cloudy gas of glitter. I have a body in spirit and it’s as healthy as it was before the war.


End file.
